Lindy West is essentially the most profitable feminist author of her (and my) era. In her pomp at Jezebel, she mastered each viral takedowns—sorry, Love Actually—and confessional writing. She embraced adjectives that had been meant to demean her: loud, fats, shrill. When Lindy shouted, girls listened.
That background is what makes the publication of her new memoir, Adult Braces, such a cultural second. Adult Braces is many issues: a paean to the various landscapes of America, an advert for #vanlife, a reminder to be grateful that your companion hasn’t talked you right into a throuple with a a lot thinner lady. It can also be the tombstone for Millennial Feminism—that swirling brew of Media Twitter, weblog snark, the Great Awokening, whaling on Lena Dunham, fats positivity, and boring straight individuals figuring out as queer by way of accounting methods. To learn Lindy West is to gaze backwards in time, to an period when it was acceptable to jot down “welp!” in copy.
West lived the Millennial author’s dream. She rose from running a blog for the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger to an identical job on the new-media darling Jezebel, and went on to jot down columns for legacy retailers reminiscent of The Guardian. On the facet, she printed a New York Times best-selling memoir, Shrill, and turned it right into a tv present that ran for 3 seasons. She left Twitter after being bombarded with abuse however remained unbowed. Sure, #MeToo was a witch-hunt, she wrote within the Times: “I’m a Witch and I’m Hunting You.” There was even a fairy-tale ending, with a good-looking musician named Ahamefule Oluo who beloved her simply as she was. “My wedding was perfect,” she wrote in 2015, “and I was fat as hell the whole time.” Can girls have all of it? It regarded like Lindy West might.
In mild of this, Adult Braces makes two massive claims. The first is that rather a lot of the above story—the Authorized Version of the Life of Lindy West—was a buffed-up model of the reality. Getting demise threats was not character-building, not some little on-line brouhaha, however psychologically disturbing in a method that spilled over into her offline life. (“The trolling was so extreme that Monica Lewinsky reached out,” she writes.) She felt like an outsider on Shrill, diminished to listening to different writers talk about whether or not her (actual) dad’s demise was an excessive amount of of a downer to incorporate within the collection. Her fatness wasn’t solely a joyful expression of her appetites; as a substitute she has now realized that “I am at my biggest when I am at my saddest.”
Even her relationship wasn’t all that it appeared. In her 2019 essay assortment, The Witches Are Coming, she had written that she and Oluo—her “best friend” and a “once in a generation” musical expertise—had a “dawn ritual” the place they lay in mattress speaking for hours. In Adult Braces, she provides that “what I omitted was that we’d only developed that ‘ritual’ to mitigate a toxic pattern we’d been stuck in for years: I’d wake up anxious, I’d vomit my anxiety on Aham, he’d snap at me for triggering his anxiety, I’d feel alone and unsupported, I’d stare at him with tears in my eyes until he had a panic attack, he’d zone out for the rest of the day and not listen to a word I said.”
As it presents a revisionist historical past of West’s 2010s, Adult Braces makes one other grand declare: that West is now polyamorous and lovin’ it. Yes, she may need been upset when a fan texted her with the information that Oluo was out in public kissing one other lady. (Even then, she admits midway by way of the ebook, that wasn’t the entire reality: “I told you Aham was secretly seeing one woman in 2019. He was actually seeing two.”) But actually, she completely adores her and Oluo’s now-mutual girlfriend, Roya, to the extent that by way of sheer pressure of will, she has turn into bisexual. It solely took driving a van from Seattle to the Florida Keys and again, whereas additionally present process beauty dentistry, to comprehend this.
When I learn Adult Braces, my instinctive response was: I don’t consider you.
To me, it appeared apparent that Oluo, who’s combined race, had efficiently used West’s want to be progressive towards her: “He believed that monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership. I had to admit that perhaps I didn’t feel it as keenly, as a white person.” Oluo had additionally rebranded himself as a “non-binary he/they,” maybe to shrug off any suggestion that he was performing like each harem-patrolling patriarch in historical past.
Now, I do know loads of individuals who have come to a distinct understanding of their sexuality as adults—largely Later-Life Lesbians, or LLLs—however it appears an unlikely coincidence that the primary lady West has ever been interested in was already her husband’s girlfriend. Not least when the ebook contains this line: “Being cool about polyamory felt like a growing imperative in progressive circles.”
The response to the ebook has been fascinating, by which I imply that principally nobody else believes West’s account of her polyamorous relationship both. This discourse has turn into so overwhelming that in a latest Substack post, West expressed annoyance and defensiveness that anybody would query the newest model of her story: “My life isn’t subject to public audit. I already gave you what I wanted to give you.”
This is perhaps true, though I might say again that in case you don’t need individuals choosing over your private life, keep away from writing a memoir.
Nonetheless, I do really feel nice sympathy for West. How was she to know that the good omertà of Millennial Feminism—that we needed to take no matter individuals mentioned about their life tales at face worth—had damaged?
Over the previous half decade, our unchallenged deference to individuals’s personal declarations about their lives has collapsed. We noticed too many flimsy or clearly politicized accusations sneak beneath the wire of “Believe women.” Just suppose of Tara Reade, whose unconvincing claims of sexual assault towards Joe Biden were seized on by Republicans, and who introduced that she had defected to Russia in 2023. We have watched as former icons of physique positivity shot themselves up with GLP-1s on the first alternative—suggesting that they didn’t, actually, really feel comfortable and wholesome at any dimension. Some of them, like Lizzo, maintain that they solely tried GLP-1s, however have truly misplaced weight by way of “mind-over-matter.” (If you consider that, I’ve obtained a crystal flute to promote you.)
The debate round West’s ebook has targeted virtually solely on litigating the happiness of her relationship, however Adult Braces presents one other instance of the collapse of self-identification. At one level, her therapist, Judith, means that she may need ADHD. West is skeptical, however she has at all times been disorganized, although high-achieving, and figures: Why not get a prescription for stimulants? Sadly, her well being supplier has different concepts. Dr. Buzzkill tells West that she might want to communicate together with her mom, as a result of (because the DSM-5 states) ADHD is a dysfunction that’s current from childhood. “I should have said no,” West writes. “I was nearly forty years old at this point. My word on my own life should be sufficient, and under no circumstances should a medical professional need to call my mommy!”
My phrase alone life must be ample—there it’s. This, to place it bluntly, just isn’t how medical diagnoses work, or I might have had a mind tumor 15 instances thus far. But it’s the Millennial mantra—I’m the captain of my ship, the writer of my life, the protagonist of actuality. Incidentally, this is identical logic that uncritically affirms younger kids’s assertions that they’re the other intercourse. That place can also be half of the progressive bundle endorsed by West, regardless of her penning this about GLP-1 prescriptions for adolescents: “Wegovy has been approved for children as young as twelve, when we don’t even know the long-term physical effects, let alone the mental ones.” Wow, seems like we must be very cautious about highly effective, life-altering medication and possibly not accuse anybody who has questions on them of secretly wanting chubby children to die.
The fascinating query is why West craved an ADHD prognosis so badly—aside, presumably, from entry to the scrumptious fruits of Big Pharma. “When Judith introduced the notion I might have ADHD, a weight of shame I didn’t even know I carried was vaporized,” she writes. To me, it is a very telling comment concerning the milieu by which West has discovered herself. Perhaps the best hallmark of Millennial Feminism was how harshly it handled girls. We had been those who had been supposed to surrender our boundaries, rewrite our sexualities, and defenestrate our heroines. (Oh, so that you admire the suffragists for passing the Nineteenth Amendment? Incorrect, they had been “white feminists.”) And if we had been ever fallible, we had been purported to be very, very ashamed.
This is why so many ladies who thought of themselves left-wing—myself included—ultimately parted methods with Millennial Feminism. At the start, the motion felt intoxicating and liberating, however it quickly grew to become clear that sticking with Millennial Feminism would have required submitting ourselves to a voluntary lobotomy. After all, Lindy West basically did. The whole ADHD passage in Adult Braces exhibits a naturally humorous author wrestling with the injunction that vast swaths of life are exempt from even the mildest mockery. She concedes that different individuals is perhaps half of what she calls the “social media ADHD self-diagnosis boom” with conduct “that frays the edges of credibility (not everything can be because of your ADHD, babe!)”. But of course this might not apply to her. As an apart, it seems that West has realized to handle her disorganization the identical method that many males do: She now has a spouse. In her submit defending their relationship, she notes that Roya is superb at “watering plants,” acquiring pet insurance coverage, and “send[ing] calendar invites.”
For me, writing conduct manuals—that’s, instructing readers on the newest factors of political etiquette—was no approach to stay, and each the fashion and content material of my writing has modified over the previous decade. One of the headiest issues about Adult Braces is how West’s prose fashion was pickled within the mid-2010s, so her use of caps lock and exclamation marks acted on me as a strong Proustian madeleine. Please take pleasure in this dispatch from Savannah, Georgia, as soon as West discovers that the composer of “Jingle Bells” additionally served within the Confederate Army: “James L. Pierpont was a little bitch, and I’m GLAD he got into a drifted bank and I’m GLAD he got upsot, tbh! More like Shidnight in the Shartin’ of Poop and Peepee!!!!!!!!”
You can hint the precise second that West determined she wished to stay a progressive in good standing greater than she wished to take the piss. It occurred proper after she was brutalized by the social-media backlash to her take-no-prisoners running a blog persona at Jezebel. “It turns out that having thousands of people make fun of you and threaten to rape and murder you can make you feel unsafe in certain spaces for way longer than you expect,” she writes of this era in Adult Braces. Much just like the liberals pushed into the arms of MAGA by a brush with cancellation, West had a style of vicious misogynistic backlash from web strangers and retreated into the progressive neighborhood of the Pacific Northwest. She went from evaluating Hooters to a slavery-themed restaurant in 2009 to having her stand-in character within the TV collection Shrill, Annie, get educated by strippers that their work was truly very empowering.
West herself acknowledged the shift in 2016, though she attributed it to “learning to be a socially responsible person.” She added: “Yeah, please don’t read anything of mine from before 2014.”
Of course, it’s one factor to set inflexible and unforgiving guidelines of human conduct. It’s fairly one other to count on anybody to stay by them. What killed Millennial Feminism was the hole between what its excessive priestesses demanded and what they had been capable of endure themselves. If you insist that accepting polyamory is the value of being a very good individual, after which write a ebook about your throuple the place the entrance cowl exhibits you with mascara-streaked tears working down your face, individuals will spot the dissonance.
Similarly, West’s physique positivity required her to be superhuman—to be, not like each different individual on the planet, fully unaffected by waves of strangers criticizing her weight. Her followers demanded that she be completely fats and completely comfortable, and guilt-tripped her for any deviation. “Sometimes, when I am doing better and can find the will to cook and think and move and live, I get smaller,” she writes in Adult Braces. “Once, when I posted a selfie on the far side of a particularly epic depression, I received this comment from a stranger: ‘Can we not watch another fat positive body shrink?’”
As somebody with an overfamiliar relationship with the biscuit tin myself, I see 2010s fats activism as an comprehensible response by bigger individuals to being attacked for having an (on the time) incurable metabolic illness. It’s not a betrayal to wish to be cured of an sickness: We don’t suppose statins are for the weak, or that folks with hypertension simply have to study self-control. Yet each side of the weight-loss debate grew to become connected to impossibly doctrinaire positions. One facet argued that nobody might presumably be fats and comfortable, the opposite that nobody was allowed to be sad about being fats. In 2017, West interviewed one other icon of Millennial Feminism, Roxane Gay, and informed her, “It is important to talk about the fact that weight-loss surgery is dangerous, that people die. It’s barbaric that so many people feel pressured to have this surgery that can kill them.” Gay agreed, describing the therapy as pushed by fatphobia, a “surgery to completely rearrange my body for the rest of my life, and I’m going to be nutrient-deprived for the rest of my life, and I might die doing this, but that’s better than spending another day in this body in this world.” Gay had a sleeve gastrectomy in 2018.
I don’t decide her for that: Gay made a rational choice concerning the dangers of a process to broaden and lengthen her life. But it isn’t purely fatphobia that sees docs suggest weight-loss therapies. It isn’t social conservatism that has seen so many readers disbelieve West’s rapid-onset bisexuality. Millennial Feminism failed as a result of it was suffocating, immiserating, and sometimes at odds with observable details about human nature.
Today, only a few traces of it stay. Jezebel was bought off and closed. Tumblr has withered. The viral web not reliably delivers visitors to epic takedowns of problematic figures, so hungry younger freelancers have largely stopped pitching them. The publishing trade’s lust for jeremiads about “white feminism” is over. No one has used the phrase girlboss unironically in years. A key feminist authorized precedent, Roe v. Wade, fell partially as a result of Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to retire, a indisputable fact that makes me wince each time I keep in mind that one of the most-lauded books of Millennial Feminism was Irin Carmon’s Notorious RBG.
In 2014, West wrote a farewell post to mark the top of her time at Jezebel, headlined, for causes finest identified to herself: “My Fart Will Go On.” (Her Substack is known as Butt News, so credit score for sticking to a theme.) The submit ended with some phrases of recommendation for her readers: “You don’t have to be the Cool Girl. You don’t have to pander. You can be funny and sharp and responsible and humane all at the same time. But don’t be afraid to defend your boundaries. Call a dick a dick. Stuff is changing. We’re winning.”
Sadly, there was no time for Millennial Feminism to get drained of all of the successful. Nine months later, Donald Trump introduced his run for the presidency.
